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The Atlantic reports that two years ago, Facebook briefly conducted an experiment on a subset of its users, altering the mix of content shown to them to emphasize content sorted by tone, negative or positive, and observe the results. From the Atlantic article: For one week in January 2012, data scientists skewed what almost 700,000 Facebook users saw when they logged into its service. Some people were shown content with a preponderance of happy and positive words; some were shown content analyzed as sadder than average. And when the week was over, these manipulated users were more likely to post either especially positive or negative words themselves.
This tinkering was just revealed as part of a new study, published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Many previous studies have used Facebook data to examine “emotional contagion,” as this one did. This study is different because, while other studies have observed Facebook user data, this one set out to manipulate it.
At least they showed their work.

I don't think this is about whether Facebook had a legal right to do this, but more on that in a minute. It's more about whether it was ethical on their part. Regardless, I think it clearly was not ethical for the researchers to do this study without getting the approval of the users who took part in the study.

Getting back to the legal issue, every site or app has a Terms of Services agreement. Does FB's TOS say that you might be randomly placed in a A/B test used for academic research purposes? If they don

But surely users are allowed to be put in an A/B test used for *commercial/advertisement* purposes, right? Is doing something for academic purposes somehow worse than for business purposes? Personally, I would rather my online behavior be used for a purpose which nominally increases our knowledge than for a purpose which increases someone's bottom line.

That said, I do find this whole thing to be a little shady...but I'm not sure it's a particularly rational reaction, given that I rarely care about A/B te

So you would outlaw an advertising firm giving out two different coupons for the same food item, listed as "0% fat!" on one and "fat free!" on the other? After all, they are, at the end of the day, running an experiment on you the consumer, to find out which phrasing is more effective.

I doubt it. First, there is no "law" requiring informed consent for such an innocuous study, just ethical guidelines. Second, there is no law saying that entities can only do things positively asserted in the TOS. Companies do behavior research all the time. Grocery stores experiment with different product placement, different background music, different lighting. They are not expected to get consent for that. This is no different. I am feeling a distinct lack of outrage about this.

A psychological experiment cannot be called innocuous before the results are in.
Who knows, maybe a extremely depressed person is 20 times more likely to commit suicide if they see that the world is 100% perfectly happy and positive.

No it was not. It was an experiment, they might of had some idea of what they thought was going to happen, but the entire point was to try and see.
They were hoping that something would happen, but the more unexpected and interesting the result the better, really.

In conducting the experiment, they among other things caused harm through inducing depression which persisted even after the experiment. Causing harm was part of the intent even if not the ultimate intent.

Apparently the psychologist involved thought is was OK, because as it is part of normal default policy, âoeFacebook apparently manipulates peopleâ(TM)s News Feeds all of the timeâ. https://theconversation.com/sh... [theconversation.com].

The researchers were trying to incite negative emotions in the subjects. That's unethical if the people don't consent. You're playing with people's lives beyond Facebook. Follow ET's rule: Beeee Gooood.

From a legal standpoint, for an activity to be considered "research", it must be "designed to develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge". http://www.virginia.edu/vpr/ir... [virginia.edu]

When a website uses A/B testing to improve its own internal operations, it's seeking to privately develop limited knowledge on its own operations, rather than general knowledge. This puts it outside the scope of US federal regulations on research, which have been narrowly crafted to avoid regulating commercial activities like these.

I really doubt Facebook conducted this experiment in order to "develop or contribute to generalizable knowledge" out of the kindness of their hearts. Far more likely, they seek to profit from it by generating more posts, more traffic, etc.

This is no different from retail stores conducting studies linking customer spending habits to item locations; they do such studies all the time.

Yes there is laws against this. Anyone who lives in Canada, and is a part of the experiment but did not receive informed consent may contact Health Canada/federal crown about it. It's illegal here. [hc-sc.gc.ca]

what if they modified "the" mix ofcontent relative to political opinons as an "experiment" just arund election time? It's still a testing. facebook? politics?....oh wait! forget about that: It's an oxymoron.

What exactly is considered a "psychological experiment"? Your definition seems very vague, and implies that any sort of software usability testing or change that involves offering different experiences to different users should be outlawed or very strictly controlled.

Take Mozilla Firefox as a recent example. Firefox 28 had a shitty, but at least partially usable user interface. Then Mozilla released Firefox 29, which brought in the Australis user interface, which is indisputably a pretty much unusable pile

Most of this 'free' software has a "do you accept the terms and conditions" clause that you have to click "I agree" in order to install or run the software.Now the enforcability of such agreements may be open to dispute, especcially if it entailled some sacrifice on the users part (you agree to give up your firstborn child to us..) but it usually would cover "we can change the user interface at any time, and don't complain if memory leaks cause your system to crash eventually)

What actually disturbs me more is: why should they do this? The answer is simple: They want to determine the most effective non-obvious way of creating filter bubbles to make the user feel well and stay longer.

It is so-to say a "second order filter bubble", i.e. the use of a positive feedback mechanism.

It's called the Common Rule [hhs.gov], although it generally only applies to federally funded research. There is some evidence [cornell.edu] that this study was in part federally funded. I think there are serious questions about whether a click-through agreement meets the standards of informed consent.

Although the study was approved by an institutional review board, I'm surprised, and the comment from the Princeton editor makes me wonder how well they understood the research design (or how clearly it was explained to them). This would never have gotten past my IRB.

What specifically does the Data Use Policy say about this? The bit I saw quoted was that users agreed to Facebook's "internal operations", with research being an example of those. Peer-reviewed publication in a journal is clearly not an internal operation.

That's not informed consent as it would be deemed by any research institution or court of law. Informed consent requires a discussion with the subject on the nature of the research, its purpose, the manner in which data will be collected and used, and an explicit agreement from the user. What Facebook thinks it has is implied consent - which they frankly don't have either.

There are laws governing obtaining informed consent from humans before performing psychological experiments on them. I doubt that a EULA can override them. This should be interesting...

There is no such law. In any case, this is the the basis for the entire news business. Why do they report murders but not acts of charity (unless a celebrity is involved)? It is all about getting you to watch and see ads. Facebook is doing nothing that TV news hasn't been doing for years.

There are laws governing obtaining informed consent from humans before performing psychological experiments on them.

That only applies to federally funded research (which means almost all colleges and universities). Attempting to apply this to the private sector would raise serious First Amendment questions. What one person calls "psychological experiments", another might call "protected free speech".

That only applies to federally funded research (which means almost all colleges and universities). Attempting to apply this to the private sector would raise serious First Amendment questions. What one person calls "psychological experiments", another might call "protected free speech".

"There are laws governing obtaining informed consent from humans before performing psychological experiments on them. I doubt that a EULA can override them. This should be interesting..."

They can do whatever they want, it's their site. They decide what to show you, if they show you something and when.And they have the right to sell that information about you at any price they choose.It's their business.You are the product, the psychologists are the customer.

That's the first thing that popped into my mind. After having spent many hours over the past week helping my daughter do paperwork so that she could submit her extremely benign science fair project to the county science fair's institutional review board, I'm wondering how FB can get way with this? I guess that they can get away with it because no one will call them out on it, unless some victims file a lawsuit.

That's the modern world -- a 15 year old kid doing something demonstrably harmless has to do hou

It's also not just a legal matter. Performing experiments on humans without their consent is immoral.

So is it immoral when walmart puts poptarts on the endcap or different colored bubblegum in the impulse aisle?They are trying to see if they can manipulate you into buying more product. Stores even experiment in different colors.Some stores want you to stay longer so they use happy colors. Other stores want you to leave quickly to make roomfor the next customer so they use sad colors. They are altering the moods of their customers too and again, withoutconsent. I don't know what the threshold should be

Facebook is profoundly useful though, as a messaging service that everyone uses and to keep abreast of things happening in friends' lives in a central, easy-to-access location. It's also quite useful when applying for jobs, because nothing says "social outcast" like not having a Facebook account.

Facebook is profoundly useful though, as a messaging service that everyone uses

I assure you that not "everyone" uses Facebook to communicate, including the majority of my social circle. Everyone I would actually communicate via Facebook to I can reach via some combination of email, phone, text messaging, instant messaging, US mail, fax, video conference etc. Not to mention actually meeting them in person. If you really need Facebook to stay in touch then you really aren't that close to begin with.

...nothing says "social outcast" like not having a Facebook account.

If you think Facebook is required to be in with the "cool" crowd then you need to ser

It's nothing like that. I was raised to be insular, and do not let others' opinions and other mental predications (this also includes news media, marketing, and other forms of mob-mentality conditioning) dictate my course of life. For myself, the opinions of me and mine are all that matter, and I learned from a very young age to live my life for me and mine, yet be a good person to others around me as long as I have a reason to be. Now, I am human, so I do not deny my social instinct. I just choose not to b

This is quite interesting research that should never have been done. I am rather surprised that the National Academy published the results of a study which violated multiple ethical guidelines put in place to protect human subjects. Did Facebook track the number of suicides in the 700,000 sample? Was the rate of those given a sadder than average stream have a higher or lower rate? Do the Facebook researchers address the ethical questions posed by performing such an experiment at all?

Oh do stop being so precious. It's no different from an individual posting a sad or depressed piece, themselves. Should they then be sued, arrested or punished for the "emotional damage" they cause to anyone who reads it?

Facebook deliberately did it, to see the effects. Manipulating people is never ethically right.

And yet there are individuals who do exactly the same thing every day. I would suggest that there are also organisations that make a positive decision to post content to change the emotions of their readers: whether to make them happy (and possibly tie that happy feeling to the website's message - religious, political, cultural), or angry or apathetic.

Just like every advertisement we see is designed to manipulate our emotions, websites do it all the time for gain, so to have FB do the same is neither new

I see it in my self, on the rare occasions that I actually post, which is roughly 5-10 times a year and I see it with others whenever I go online to browse a little in the posts of the people I'm connected with... called "Friends" (Fingerquotes!) on FB:

Facebook and other "social networks" encourage posing. No two ways about it.

If you get all worked up and batter your self esteem just because somebody posted himself in cool poses or on some event that you "missed out" on... I get this a lot, since I'm only on FB for my tango dancing connections, a pastime where posing sometimes actually is part of the game. Actually knowing the person behind a neat facade on FB does put things into perspective.

Bottom line:People shouldn't get more attached to these things than it is good for them. If this neat little stund by FB shows them that, then all the better.

So basically all they've done is tell us that people respond to their surroundings. Okay, nothing new there. What would be interesting is if FB could somehow start quantifying the level of the reaction. Then, after a few hundred years of study we might start to get the glimmerings of a science.

Back when I used fb what I liked most was how you'd have a page with something actually important that loaded in a snap and fb would "fail" to thumbnail it with a nondescriptive error, but if you loaded some page full of bloatshit about something stupid it would thumbnail quickly and show right up so that you could share the stupidity to your heart's content, even if it was old now-non-news.

FB has always shown people only a subset of your posts, even if they explicitly ask to see all of them. That's a big p

They eventually revealed the reason they only show your content to a subset of your followers:

So they could charge you to reach more of them. Seriously. You can pay to "promote" your posts, and all that does is increase the reach within the people that have explicitly indicated interest in your content.

You misread my post. I have had my posts removed from my newsfeed. Not talking about friends, etc. If I view my newsfeed sorted by "most recent", fb has removed content. If I post about puppies, shows up fine. So again, not only is fb denying my content to others, its mechanisms are denying it to me as well unless I view directly on my home page.

Secret psychological tests on population in a mass? Edward Bernays [wikipedia.org] would have been elated to have this capability in his time.

In almost every act of our daily lives, whether in the sphere of politics or business, in our social conduct or our ethical thinking, we are dominated by the relatively small number of persons...who understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses. It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.

Hey, Facebook! Can you help me with some experiments of my own? I'd like to see the outcome if...

1. Right before an election, all posts favoring candidate X or the political views of party X were promoted to the top of everyone's feed and given 20 extra fake "Likes", while posts favoring the opposition are demoted and de-liked.

2. Phrases in posts favoring candidate X or the political views of party X are subtly "edited" when the appear in everyone else's news feed to be more positive (e.g., "like" to "love", "good" to "great"), while phrases in posts favoring the opposition are given the reverse treatment and sprinkled with misspellings.

3. FB users with a tendency of opposition to party X have random fake posts/comments from them appear in other's feeds only, in which they insult their friends' baby pictures, make tasteless jokes, and vaguely threaten supporters of party X to "unfriend me if ur so lame u can't take the TRUTH, lol".

Facebook users gave up their privacy and allow their personal data to be mined. Posts have been used against them by employers, criminals, government agencies, various companies and Facebook. Facebook sells your data to advertisers and other organisations. This really comes as a surprise to anyone?

What Facebook has shown is that they can easily manipulate their users in a predicable manner. In this case it was for a study but is there anything stopping them doing something like this as a service to adve

The research is (partly at least) army funded. That does explain why every academic ethic rule is ignored. Cornell has co-authored this research, so they can know. Check the last couples of lines to see for yourself. That part makes this even more disturbing. The media should include this 'small' detail.
http://www.news.cornell.edu/st... [cornell.edu]

Correction: An earlier version of this story reported that the study was funded in part by the James S. McDonnell Foundation and the Army Research Office. In fact, the study received no external funding.

Yeah they changed that after the outrage.... Here is a screenie from before because I had a feeling that the word army would be gone soon when I noticed it.
http://tinypic.com/view.php?pi... [tinypic.com]
Needless to say that the first version was correct and this is just really bad damage control.

There is way too much discussion of Facebook's legal standing here, and if you have ever seen a moot court, you can use legal reasoning and even the body of the law to argue either side. The law is based on competing priorities like politics is, and like economics.

A more telling result is the impression the disclosure leaves, which is why the story has legs. It is abit like what happened to Donald Sterling; something that seemed OK in one context got leaked into a different context where it appears total